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		<header>
			<h1>A little borrowed time</h1>
			<p>Day 00557: Wednesday, 2016 September 14</p>
		</header>
<p>
	Current countdowns:
</p>
<ul>
	<li>20 unfinished weblog entries in <a href="/en/weblog/2016/07-July/">July</a></li>
	<li>5 days until mobile voice/<abbr title="Short Message Service">SMS</abbr> service with my current carrier ends</li>
	<li>35 days until mobile data service with my current carrier ends</li>
	<li>0 days until my FreedomPop (no voice/<abbr title="Short Message Service">SMS</abbr>) cycle restarts and I can find out if I have a higher data-transfer limit than before</li>
	<li>32 days until my old domain registrar can no longer counter my charge dispute</li>
</ul>
<p>
	I found out that I have an extra day to complete two of my assignments for the week.
	It seems that the learning journal assignments are due a day after everything else.
	That will buy me time this week, but I shouldn&apos;t rely on this in future weeks.
	I took the ungraded quiz for the week, then wrote up my responses on the discussion board to other students for the week.
</p>
<blockquote>
<p>
	Yes, knowledge-hoarding does really bother me.
	And what bothers me more is that most people blindly go along with it.
	It&apos;s like I&apos;m seeing a water well with a sign, and that sign reads &quot;CAUTION: 25% MERCURY&quot;.
	However, everyone is coming along and drinking from that well anyway! And they&apos;re bringing this water to their friends, their neighbors, and their families, despite there being a perfectly clean water well on the other side of town.
	It makes no sense to me, and I just wish that they&apos;d stop hurting themselves, those around them, and those yet to come.
	As a species, we humans should be better than that.
</p>
</blockquote>
<blockquote>
<p>
	For patents, one needs to specifically apply for the patent before the knowledge becomes locked away from public use.
	At the point that the patent is approved, you don&apos;t even need to write something down to be in in violation of that legally-imposed monopoly.
	Building an item that implements something that the patent covers would violate the patent, but using something that was built by someone else could even land you on the wrong end of a patent suit (Nazer, 2014).
</p>
<p>
	As for plagiarism, the story&apos;s a bit different.
	Plagiarism is based in copyright law instead of patent law.
	Both sets of laws are unethical and try to grant ownership over ideas, but they are still very different sets of laws.
	In copyright law (and thus plagiarism), simply conveying an idea, be it verbally, graphically, or in writing, grants you &quot;ownership&quot; over that idea.
	For example, if you were to conduct a verbal interview, to use anything said in your work, you&apos;d need to cite the interviewee as your source.
</p>
<p>
	Scratch that last paragraph, apparently it&apos;s wrong.
	Or rather, the part about it being in based in copyright law is wrong.
	I probably got confused due to the fact that plagiarists are often dealt with using the copyright laws (Plagiarism Today, 2013), but they&apos;re not actually the same laws.
	I imagine that the same rules of who &quot;owns&quot; what still apply, though what counts as infringement is different.
	I&apos;ll have to read more about this when I have time, but I think that you must still cite verbal, textual, and any other sources.
</p>
<p>
	Source:
</p>
<p>
	Nazer, D.
	(2014, August 30).
	Actually, Mr.
	Waxman, Consumers Are Sued For Patent Infringement All the Time | Electronic Frontier Foundation.
	Retrieved from https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2014/04/actually-mr-waxman-consumers-are-sued-patent-infringement-all-time
</p>
<p>
	Plagiarism Today.
	(2013, October 7).
	The Difference Between Copyright Infringement and Plagiarism - Plagiarism Today.
	Retrieved from https://www.plagiarismtoday.com/2013/10/07/difference-copyright-infringement-plagiarism/
</p>
</blockquote>
<blockquote>
<p>
	Huh.
	I guess that I was wrong.
	I thought that plagiarism law was a subset of copyright law, but that doesn&apos;t seem to be the case.
	I&apos;ll need to look into this further when time allows.
	Thank you for helping me to learn!
</p>
</blockquote>
<blockquote>
<p>
	Good catch on the sexual harassment.
	I hadn&apos;t even considered that, but I agree, it&apos;s highly unethical.
	You mention sexual harassment can happen from a teacher to a student or from a student to a teacher, but it can also happen between students.
	I haven&apos;t heard of a case of it happening between teachers, but that could happen as well.
	Corruption is highly unethical as well, like you said.
	It seems to be so pervasive in so many fields, not only in the school system.
	It&apos;s sad.
</p>
<p>
	I hadn&apos;t heard of people climbing out windows to cheat while the instructor is in the room.
	That&apos;s got to take a lot of nerve! I wonder how they get away with it.
	It seems like it would be super easy to catch students at that.
</p>
</blockquote>
<blockquote>
<p>
	I think that you&apos;re right about misattribution of the quoted wording.
	People are a bit finicky and prefer that people know that not only did the idea come from them, but that the exact wording was their own creation as well.
</p>
<p>
	It&apos;s disputable as to if self-plagiarism is even a thing.
	&quot;&apos;Self-plagiarism&apos; is a conceptual oxymoron from both the literal and legal perspectives&quot; (Creutz, 2010).
	&quot;Unlike traditional plagiarism, which much more clearly-defined rules and consequences, self-plagiarism often exists in a gray area, one where it is hard to determine what action should be taken or even if anything wrong was done.&quot; (Plagiarism Today, 2011)
</p>
<p>
	I would certainly recommend citing yourself, as it doesn&apos;t do any harm, avoids a grey area, and is gratis advertising for your past work, but I wouldn&apos;t call failing to do so a form of plagiarism.
</p>
<p>
	I like that part about you swearing on a dictionary! I should have sworn on a science textbook or something.
	Next time, next time.
	I might have to try your strategy for keeping references strait.
	My own method is a bit messy.
	I keep all my URIs that point to references at the bottom of the LibreOffice document or (if I have a lot) at the bottom of the paragraph that the references relate to, then use Wikipedia-like citation numbers starting at zero.
	I don&apos;t even put the citations in APA format until the final draft.
</p>
<p>
	I agree, APA-style references are horridly painful.
	The reference format is a mess, there&apos;s not always a one-to-one correspondence between in-text references and what they represent in the references section (for example, &quot;(Dawson, 2016)&quot; could mean either of two papers, if someone cited two papers written by me this year), and a bunch of useless garbage information is required in the citation (such as the year).
	I agree that we shouldn&apos;t need to use APA citations for a simple discussion like this as well, but I&apos;m a bit paranoid, so just in case, I&apos;ve been citing my sources anyway whenever there&apos;s anything to actually cite, though I&apos;ve also been a bit more relaxed than I am with papers, and haven&apos;t been looking up sources to back what I say when the ideas are actually my own.
</p>
<p>
	Creutz, R.
	(2010, December 1).
	Self-Plagiarism: Is it Really Plagiarism? Retrieved from http://www.ithenticate.com./plagiarism-detection-blog/bid/52948/Self-Plagiarism-Is-it-Really-Plagiarism#.V9mQa0hlAy6
</p>
<p>
	Plagiarism Today.
	(2011, September 7).
	Self-Plagiarism: Ethical Shortcut or Moral Scourge? - Plagiarism Today.
	Retrieved from https://www.plagiarismtoday.com/2011/09/07/self-plagiarism-ethical-shortcut-or-moral-scourge/
</p>
</blockquote>
<blockquote>
<p>
	Fabrication seems like a bad idea on so many levels.
	If you&apos;re caught at it, the repercussions for your education and your career could be pretty bad.
	You may be dismissed or fired.
	On the other hand, if you&apos;re not caught, you&apos;ve cheated yourself out of actual learning (if you&apos;re in school) or spread misinformation (if you&apos;re writing as part of your job).
	You could save a little time, I suppose, but it really doesn&apos;t seem like it&apos;s worth it.
</p>
<p>
	You say to err on the side of caution by citing if you&apos;re unsure if the citation is required, but I&apos;d take it a bit further, just to be safe.
	Even if the idea is your own, someone else will have come up with the same idea at some point, and you could be accused of plagiarism, despite never having read that source.
	With search engines being pretty fast these days, I&apos;d recommend finding a source that backs up your idea, then cite them as the source.
	In that way, not only do you avoid plagiarism accusations, you also have more data to back your claims.
</p>
</blockquote>
<p>
	Lastly, I finished up the final drafts of both essays for the week.
	<a href="/en/coursework/UNIV1001/Free_Business_Models_and_Why_They_Matter_to_Me.xhtml"><span title="Online Education Strategies">UNIV 1001</span>&apos;s essay</a> has had a lot more effort put into the content, due to being able to choose a topic that I&apos;m invested in, but I put zero effort into formatting it, due to being unable to use a free font.
	<a href="/en/coursework/POLS1503/The_World_Bank_and_the_Integrated_Storm_Water_Drain_project_in_Chennai.xhtml"><span title="Globalization">POLS 1503</span>&apos;s essay</a> has had less effort put into content.
	I&apos;d love to have put more effort in, but there wasn&apos;t time after putting too much time into the other essay.
	However, the formatting on this essay is better.
	I was able to use a free font, so I actually paid attention to formatting.
	I wanted to use FreeMono, but felt that DejaVu Sans might appear more professional in the eyes of the professor.
	I used bold, italics, size differences, and spaced as 1.5 instead of single spacing.
	If you don&apos;t tie me to a proprietary font, I&apos;ll give you a nicer-looking paper.
	However, none of the formatting differences are present in the archived copies that I have here on this website.
	I haven&apos;t had time to set up the <abbr title="Cascading Style Sheets">CSS</abbr> for the essays yet, but when I do, they will be formatted the same as one another.
	When I went to upload the essays, I found that the submission form asked me type the essay into the form itself instead of upload the essay as a file.
	Why did University of the People need me to be able to create word processing documents and save in DOC/ODT format? If I&apos;m going to either be typing into the form directly or pasting the text in, why does it matter what file format the document is saved in on my hard drive?
</p>
<p>
	Near the end of the day, my family and I worked on loading up the van to take another load to the storage unit.
	We&apos;ll take it over tomorrow, then Vanessa and our mother will be headed over to Salem to check out an apartment.
</p>
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